Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 13, August 4, 2024
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“What sign are you going to give us…?” The crowd asks as a Greek chorus, all speaking the same thing at the same time…When meditating on these biblical stories, I like to use an Ignatian exercise in which, every time I read it, I think of myself as a different character in the story. Thinking of myself as Jesus, my response to the crowd asking for a sign is: “Were you not on the other side of the lake yesterday when I fed THE 5,000 OF YOU WITH FIVE LOAVES OF BREAD AND TWO FISH?” And so, we give thanks that I am not Jesus!
This is the second of a five-week series of readings walking us through a single chapter in the Gospel according to John. Every three years, the lectionary invites us to spend five weeks contemplating Jesus’s self-description as “the bread of life,” or “the bread which comes down from heaven.” Last week we heard John’s Gospel’s version of the feeding of the five thousand. This week that story continues with the crowds hungry for more, and Jesus challenging them (and us) to move beyond the bread Jesus gave on the hillside to the “bread of life” that is Jesus himself. It is a provocative invitation to a deep transformation. It’s not about a shallow affirmation of Jesus as our Lord and Savior so we can get into heaven, but go on with our greed, selfishness and anxieties. And it is not about thinking of Jesus as just a super great exemplar, or guru or wisdom sage from whom we can learn some clever tricks about how to get through life. No, it is a strange-sounding invitation that requires we move from our heads into our hearts. Jesus says, “believe in me,” “follow me,” “learn from me.” And he goes as far as to say: Eat me, and never be hungry again. It is a wild invitation to radical intimacy!
The Gospel writer presents the dialogue between Jesus and the crowd as a kind of parallel companion to the earlier dialogue in chapter four between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. The woman asks Jesus for water; in today’s story the crowd is looking for bread. Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that there is another, more deeply nourishing water, “living water.” He tells the crowd about the bread that “comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Thinking of the water literally as physical, the woman asks for it, saying, “Sir, give me this water.” The crowd, also misunderstanding, says, “Sir, give us this bread.” And then, with an “I am” statement, Jesus declares his identity. It is a choreography of encounter, misunderstanding, and invitation to deeper consciousness. And the invitation is for us, too, to recognize the deep hungers beneath our surface hungers, and to move into deeper and more authentic forms of trust in God.
Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong or “unspiritual” about the crowd looking for more literal bread. Of course they’re looking for bread! They’re poor, food is scarce, and they need to feed themselves and their families. And let us remember that Jesus feeds them first. He tends to their physical hunger without any reservation. But he doesn’t stop there. He asks them to probe their soul hungers too. Physical food is important, but there is another form of food, a deeper kind of nourishment essential to our wellbeing so that we can thrive, and Jesus has come to provide it.
Jesus calls this deep nourishment “the food that endures for eternal life.” Now, Jesus does not say, “the food that gives you life after death.” Afterlife is not the subject here. The “eternal life” Jesus offers in not an indefinite survival in this world or a disembodied soul-life in some vague world outside of time, but rather, an intimate, mutual indwelling with God here and now, a life with and in God. It is the indestructible and super-abundant life of the Trinity lived in our own bodily human mortality. In other words, as Jesus presents it in John’s Gospel, “eternal life” is a matter of quality of life, not “quantity” of life- a “timeless” life of peace, beauty and grace.
At its heart, this is a story about hunger: physical, yes, and also the many other kinds of hungers that shape our daily lives. What are those hungers? From my conversations with people in vocational discernment, and people in spiritual direction I know there is hunger for meaning, for purpose, for connection and belonging, for intimacy and love. There is a deep hunger for healing of old wounds. And there is a craving for joy, and delight, and peace. I always tell people I hope they are not trying to be or desperately needing to be unique, because these are not unique hungers. They are very universal!
It’s one thing to name our hungers, but quite another to trust that Jesus will satisfy them. And very often what keeps us from that trust is shame- a sense that we could not possibly be worthy of God’s grace. The infamous, and fabulous Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber describes the shame that often keeps us from feasting on Jesus: “It’s hard to accept not just that God welcomes all, but that God welcomes all of me, all of you. Even that within us we wish to hide: the part that cursed at our children this week, or drank alone, or has a problem with lying, or hates our body. That part within us that suffers from depression and can’t admit it, or is too fearful to give our money away, or is riddled with shame over our sexuality, or cheats on taxes. All these parts of us we wish Jesus had the good sense to not welcome to his table are invited to taste and see that the Lord is good."
The crowd in today’s gospel story is ravenous for food, for health, for a king, for righteousness, for salvation- and they desperately misinterpret Jesus, first as a potential monarch and then as a wonderworker who will show them how to “perform the works of God.” They seek control, power, protection against their vulnerabilities, and they see themselves as the proper agents of that power and control. Their trust is rooted in themselves. I don’t know about you, but it sounds very familiar to me! But Jesus is telling the crowd (and us) that when it comes to our most fundamental nourishment, we are to root our trust, not in ourselves, but in God, who loves and cares for us. This is the “work” God gives us to do: to have faith in the one God has sent to us. Jesus is the sign and the nourishment. He wants to draw us into our innermost truth- a higher, deeper, more genuine form of ourselves where we abide in God as God abides in us. That genuine form of ourselves manifests itself as a life lived according to our deepest calling with complete integrity, knowing not only who we are, but whose we are. That is the “true bread” for which we hunger.
And that is what “faith” is really all about: not merely intellectual agreement to some particular set of claims, but a deeply relational and existential trust in a God who loves us and cares for us, and a consequent impulse to live with love, gratitude, and grace. God gives us not only our “daily bread,” but also the bread of heaven, the bread of life itself. Hearing this, we might well say with the crowd: “Give us this bread always!” ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+
